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James Tabor says cop career helped him write thrillers

Sally Pollak, Burlington (Vt.) Free Press
8:49 p.m. EDT June 5, 2013

Rigorous training made it easier to write about fear and extreme circumstances, he says.

Author James Tabor, an adventure and thriller writer, reads from his new book "Frozen Solid," a mystery based in the South Pole, at his Waitsfield, Vt., home.(Photo: Gannett/Maddie McGarvey, Burlington (Vt.) Free Press)

Hallie is the name of Tabor's mother. She raised her son on her own (with family help from five sisters) after Tabor's father died when Tabor was 7. Leland is the last name of a former top brass cop in the Washington D.C., police force, the first woman to serve as that city's deputy police chief. Her name is a nod to the years Tabor worked as a D.C. cop.

"I ended up being really comfortable — more comfortable — in the company of women," Tabor said. This made it "easier and more fun" to write from a woman's point of view, he said.

For the majority of his writing career, Tabor has written from the point of view of real-life subjects: He is a longtime writer of nonfiction — magazine pieces and books — who published his first novel last year, The Deep Zone. It, too, features Hallie Leland.

Frozen Solid, published in March (Ballantine, $26), is a follow-up to that book. In the new novel, Leland is on assignment in the South Pole, replacing a scientist who dies mysteriously. Early in her South Pole mission, with communication to her superiors (and lover) in the U.S. cut off, Leland and others at the Pole confront additional unusual deaths. Soon, Leland is compelled to confront the confounding deaths as well as conduct her scientific research: a project that involves a dangerous dive in search of crucial information.

The setting of the novel and its action are a match for each other: Each is extreme — from the weather conditions and personalities at the insulated and isolated South Pole to the risks and dangers of the events that take place there. The stakes Leland faces down couldn't be higher: a possible global disaster.

"I like to have reality-based plausible threats be the story motors," Tabor said. "I like the environments to be extreme."

'You write about what you know'

Tabor lives and works in Waitsfield, Vt., in a big house on a hill. He has lived in Vermont for more than 30 years.

Tabor, who grew up in Virginia and Connecticut, was a pre-med student at the University of Vermont for a semester before he decided to major in English. He graduated in 1970.

"I had a typewriter when I was 6 years old," Tabor said. "I was always really, really good with language and I liked writing stories. It took meeting a writer like Alan Broughton to realize I could take that to another level and maybe make a living as a writer."

“I ended up being really comfortable in the company of women.”

Author James Tabor on his female protagonist

Tabor got married (to the first of three wives) his senior year at UVM and moved to Washington, D.C., so his wife could finish college. He got work tending bar —and for a stint managed a place where up-and-coming Bruce Springsteen performed — and did freelance writing on the side. Soon, he had assignments from the Washington Post, writing for their Weekend section, Tabor said.

"My first assignment was go out and hang glide," Tabor recalled.

A magazine piece built on "full-blown reportage" that was a profile of then FBI director William Webster was killed after several re-writes, Tabor said.

"I dug hard and I dug deep," Tabor said ..."I learned that kind of reporting was nowhere near as fun as hang gliding."

Tabor during this time was writing fiction on the side. He was accepted into the MFA writing program at Johns Hopkins, where he worked with the novelist John Barth.

"It was an amazing experience," Tabor said. He wrote a novel, Junctures, about a marriage that was falling apart. "You write about what you know," he said.

An officer with an MFA

Armed with his MFA, he got a job as a police officer on the Washington, D.C., force. Tabor thinks it's a safe bet that he was the only D.C. cop with a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins.

(But there was a cop with an MFA in music who sometimes sang the national anthem at Redskins games, Tabor said.)

His six years on the force, learning from black officers, were instrumental in helping to change his racial attitudes and fully understand that "people are people," Tabor said.

"That was probably one of the most important changes that occurred in my life," said Tabor, whose great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier.

For his work as a writer, the years as a police officer also offered benefits: "I think it makes it easier to write about violence," Tabor said. "I think it makes it easier to write about crime and law enforcement. It makes it easier to write about fear, and people under stress, people in all kinds of dire and extreme conditions."

After living in New York City for a time, Tabor made his way to Vermont in 1981, when he moved to Brattleboro, Vt. — his home base when he was host of a PBS show, The Great Outdoors.

"It turns out I was a natural ham," Tabor said. "I really liked being on camera." The stories took him on adventures to far-flung places, including Alaska and Hawaii. "I would've done that for the rest of my life," he said. The show lasted two seasons, and Tabor turned his attention again to freelance writing.

He lives with his wife, Liz Tabor, and their German shepherd, Sig, in Waitsfield. His two sons live together in New York.

In recent years, after writing nonfiction books, Tabor thought it was time — nearly four decades after getting his MFA — to write a novel. Thus, his first Hallie Leland book was born.

Writing fiction is much harder than writing nonfiction, Tabor said.

"With nonfiction, you have it on a platter," he said. "With fiction, you start with nothing. It's much harder than I thought it would be."